Hocking College to Hold Appalachian Outdoor Adventure Oct 9th-11th

Join Ohio’s Hill Country this weekend at the Appalachian Outdoor Adventure at Hocking College! Stop by and say ‘hello!’ and we’ll say ‘hi!’ back!

By SARAH GUINN MESSENGER STAFF JOURNALIST, Sep 8, 2015

NELSONVILLE — Hocking College will host a two-day event called Appalachian Outdoor Adventure, set to take place Oct. 9-10, the college’s spokesman Mike Brown said.

The college once hosted the Paul Bunyan Festival, and the Appalachian Outdoor Adventure is intended to replace it Brown said to The Messenger.

“The college was looking for a similar event that would touch on natural resources and be an event people from Ohio and all over could come to,” he said. “We think this is it.”

The college also hosted Hocktoberfest, which started in 2013 and replaced the Paul Bunyan Festival.

When asked if the Appalachian Outdoor Adventure would replace Hocktoberfest, Jestinah McDonald, development coordinator for the Hocking College Foundation told The Messenger the Appalachian Outdoor Adventure will replace Hocktoberfest, meaning the two will not be separate events.

The event is set to take place the same weekend as Ohio University’s homecoming, but according to Brown, there will be plenty of entertainment offered at Hocking College’s festival over the two-day span, and is “not a conflict with OU.”

McDonald said Appalachian Outdoor Adventure would provide the area with additional choices of entertainment that weekend.

“We were hoping with the extra traffic, that it might entice more folks,” she said.

The campus will also host alumni weekend, homecoming, and family weekend during the festival, she said.

“This is an attempt on a large scale to bring people back in to the outdoors,” he said. “There ’s many people in our area who participate in the outdoors, but Columbus and elsewhere, there’s a lot of people who don’t know anything about the outdoors.”

The event is set to feature the Stihl Timberworks Lumberjack Show; Shane Rickly, a professional bull rider, and the inaugural Appalachian triathlon/duathlon and half marathon, which is presented by OhioHealth.

Brown expects a crowd of 3,000-5,000 to turn out for the event, he said.